“Baby Blues” Is Winding Down After Nearly 40 Years
After tens of thousands of strips, creators Rick Kirkman and Jerry Scott are stepping back from the daily grind — but the MacPherson family isn't going anywhere.
Author: Rachel DeSchepper
Publish Date:March 19, 2026
All good things must come to an end, and that’s the case for one of our long-standing favorites, “Baby Blues,” which is phasing out new material after 37 years in syndication and more than 13,000 strips.
Starting last week and for the next six months, newspapers and GoComics will alternate one week of new content with one week of reruns. After that, you’ll get a new Sunday strip every other week. And finally, in March of next year, we’ll officially syndicate the feature in full reruns, just like “Peanuts” and “For Better or For Worse.”
Since 1990, we’ve followed Darryl and Wanda MacPherson and the births and raising of their three kids, Zoe, Hammie, and Wren, so the slow phase-out is welcome for hard-core fans who might not be quite ready to say goodbye. But for creators Rick Kirkman (he draws) and Jerry Scott (he writes; and is also ending his second feature “Zits” in a similar manner), it’s time to move on to other things in life: travel, painting, and an escape from daily deadlines.
And for Kirkman, the struggle comes from a physical place. “When we started, my drawing tool of choice was colored pencil, which gave the strip a unique look,” he says. “Unfortunately, colored pencil puts a lot of stress on the thumb and index finger. Over the years, that created very painful arthritis in that hand.” The switch to digital drawing helped ease the pain to an extent, but the workload has simply become untenable.
The idea for “Baby Blues” began when Kirkman’s family had just welcomed baby number two, and Scott—not yet a dad—noticed how all-consuming parenting became for his longtime friend. “It tickled me,” he says. “Since conflict and struggle are the concrete and steel of storytelling, parenting seemed like a great foundation for a comic strip.”
The first "Baby Blues" strip, published January 7, 1990.
Over the years, Kirkman and Scott’s real-life kids grew into adulthood, but the MacPherson progeny have plateaued at ages 9, 7, and 2. “For over twenty-five years we advanced their ages, albeit very slowly, until several years ago, when we slowed even more to preserve a sort of sweet spot of the kids’ ages,” Kirkman explains.
And that’s where the MacPhersons have remained—with Wanda in a near-constant state of mothering frenzy, Darryl juggling full-time work and fatherhood, and the three kids continually causing chaos. The mark they’ve made on the funny pages is indelible, which is why “Baby Blues” joins the greats like Lynn Johnston’s “For Better or For Worse” and Charles Schulz’s “Peanuts” in remaining in newspapers indefinitely.
“For a couple of guys, lucky enough to meet each other, who started out tossing around ideas in a taco shop, it’s mind boggling to even think in those terms,” Kirkman says. “Certainly an honor to be in the same sentence as Sparky and Lynn, but I wouldn’t dare take that as existing in the same rarefied air.”
The hope, the creators say, is that the older strips feel brand-new to readers—or actually are brand-new to a new generation of families reading them in the newspaper or online.
“I’ve been going through some of the strips from the last twenty years or so and have been astonished at how fresh they seem to me,” Scott says. “There are new crops of families appearing all the time, and I hope they discover and identify with Darryl, Wanda, Zoe, Hammie and Wren like the past few generations have.”
To their fans, Scott and Kirkman simply say thank you. “You’ve been a great source of joy and sustenance,” Kirkman says. “And to readers who accused us of spying through their windows: You can relax now.”